


Rebuild

by raving_liberal



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Children of Earth Fix-It, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Not Miracle Day Compliant, Pregnancy, Torchwood Four
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 18:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4148250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the 456, Gwen tries to live something like a normal life, Jack tries to run until he forgets, and both of them fail spectacularly. Meanwhile, Ianto Jones wakes up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rebuild

With a painful lurch, Ianto’s heart starts beating again, and seconds later, his eyes snap open. He can’t immediately focus on his surroundings; everything is blindingly blue-white. He tries to lift his arms, then his legs, but he can’t. He can’t move. He can’t move, and he can’t see, and the last thing Ianto remembers is Jack cradling him in his arms as they both died. 

“We’ve only just completed your heart rebuild, Mr. Jones,” says a pleasant female voice from somewhere within the blue-white light. He can’t place the accent. “The circulatory system is a tricky business. Let’s not overexert ourselves until all your other organs up and running, shall we?”

The light begins to resolve itself into circles and long rectangles—a mix of glass-domed fluorescent lights and narrow windows showing a clear, blue sky. The woman stands near Ianto’s feet, still little more than a silhouette against the brightness. He tries to move again, straining for some control over his limbs, but they remain limp, so he settles for trying to lift his head, which is when he notices the plastic mask covering his face. Remembering the 456 and the poison air, Ianto almost starts to panic, but then he realizes it’s probably just oxygen. 

Ianto tries to ask _Where am I? Where is Jack?_ All that comes out is a rasped, “Where?”

“Sorry?” the woman asks, leaning in. “We’re having a second go at your vocal cords once your respiratory system is completely back online.”

“ _Where?_ ” Ianto forces out. The effort of that one word scrapes his throat and leaves his mouth dry.

“Ah. Very good question, Mr. Jones.” The woman leans in closer, bringing her face, or at least her spectacles and her red lipstick, almost into focus. Her skin is coppery brown, her fair hair pulled back from her face. “You’re in Torchwood 4.”

***

Gwen has an ultrasound at twenty weeks, which—along with confirming that the baby only has one head, two arms, two legs, and all the appropriately sized, placed, and numbered organs, all perfectly relevant concerns after her time in Torchwood—clearly shows a set of male genitalia. Rhys is thrilled, hugging Gwen and kissing her, and telling people they pass on the street leaving the clinic that they’re having a son, a _son_! Gwen does her best to smile, too, for Rhys’s sake, hoping he wouldn’t notice the joy doesn’t quite make it to her eyes.

Halfway through the pregnancy, and Gwen finds connecting with the baby difficult— ‘surprisingly difficult’ when she talks to Rhys about it, but ‘understandably and overwhelmingly difficult’ when she writes about in her journal, a habit she’d picked up from Ianto what seems like a lifetime ago. Since then, Gwen has seen too many things go wrong, has lost too much, to hold on to much hope for a happy future. 

“So what about names?” Rhys asks her that night over dinner. “Maybe Michael after my father.”

“I don’t know,” Gwen says. She picks at her salad, the salad she bought because Rhys needs to eat more salad, because that’s what normal people do. They fuss over their husbands not eating enough salad. 

“Or Geraint, after yours?” he offers. 

“I don’t know, Rhys,” Gwen repeats. 

“Or maybe one of those combo-names, where they smash the two together and make a new one.”

All this talk about names is more than Gwen can bear. “I said, I don’t know, Rhys!” she shouts. “I don’t know! I don’t bloody know!”

“Well, you don’t have to shout at me about it,” Rhys answers, that wounded look on his face that he’s started wearing more often than not when he’s dealing with Gwen. 

“I don’t want to talk about names for the baby,” Gwen says, still on the verge of yelling. “I don’t want to talk about the baby! That’s all we ever do anymore, talk about the baby!”

“Gwen, love, calm down,” Rhys says. He tries to rest his hand on Gwen’s arm, but she yanks it away, pushing out from the table to stand. 

“I don’t want to calm down! I won’t!” Gwen says. “I’m the one who has to pretend, day in and day out, that everything’s fine, that I’m fine, that I didn’t— and I’m telling you, I won’t anymore. Not today.”

“Just sit down, we’ll sort it out,” Rhys encourages, but Gwen just shoves her chair back towards the table as she storms off into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She curls up on the bed, treacherous belly cushioned by the six-foot body pillow Rhys bought her, and begins to weep. 

Sort it out? What is there to sort out? Gwen is pregnant in a world where her own government would steal children from their homes, pry them from the their parents hands and barter them off to an alien race. She’s pregnant in a world where nearly everyone dear to her is dead or gone, abandoning her to feign happiness and normalcy, two things she’s quite certain she’s incapable of ever fully having again. 

Rhys taps softly on the door. “Gwen? Are you all right? Do you need anything?”

“Just go away,” Gwen calls out through tears. “Go away and leave me alone.” 

Rhys doesn’t say anything else, but Gwen can sense his presence outside the bedroom door, waiting on something Gwen suspects he knows in his heart she’ll never be able to give him. Several minutes pass before Gwen hears the front door of the flat open and close. 

"Jack," Gwen whispers into her pillow. "Oh, Jack. I need you, I need you."

She doesn't see him again for months, despite it all, and it's barely enough time for a goodbye before he disappears into the light like an angel or a television alien abduction. Gwen stops crying after that night. She has no tears left to shed, not for Jack and not for Ianto, and certainly not for herself, the lone survivor of a war waged in secret and silence.

***

Seventeen galaxies and fifteen thousand years, and Jack still can't outrun his memory. No matter how many people or consenting people-like lifeforms Jack takes to bed, when he falls asleep, in the short mini-death of slumber, he dreams of Ianto, and in the morning he uses his wristcuff’s teleporter to fling himself headlong into space and time, another planet away and another few hundred years in the future.

Jack's never been a believer in the concept of a 'walk of shame', but that's what it is. His fucks-and-forward-leaps are his walk of shame, the shame of letting Ianto die, and worse, the shame of trying to forget him. Jack had promised Ianto never to forget, and here Jack spends every waking second of every day trying to wipe Ianto from his memory. If he had enough Retcon, maybe, but that's gone, too, pulverized or burned or buried under rubble in Cardiff. 

When he sees the Doctor in that bar on—wherever it is, he barely keeps track of the names or the places or the times, these days. Jack lets his hopes rise a bit, then. The boy the Doctor puts in Jack's sights is a lovely one, with a babyface and sticky-outie ears, a soft mouth and sympathetic eyes, and for the next few nights, Jack lets himself get lost in that sweet place. He's enough like Ianto that the Doctor had to have known, and just different enough that Jack can make the boy writhe and cry out under him without too much guilt tainting his enjoyment. When that string of nights is over, though, and sweet-faced Alonso clings to Jack's coat a little too dearly, that's another adjustment on the wristcuff. Another leap away. 

And then Jack discovers he's lost his Doctor, too. Alonso was an apology, for failing to come when Jack really needed him, and a goodbye. Instead of the affable but fierce warrior or the sad-eyed professor with mussed hair and pinstripes, Jack finds a gangling baby giraffe of a man, too raw and new to be any sort of balm for the boundless, churning emptiness in whatever's left of Jack's soul. He leaves before this scraped-away incarnation of the Doctor can so much as set eyes on him. Gone, lost and gone, like everything else Jack has let himself love.

He thinks about Gwen when he saw her last, rounded to bursting with the baby Rhys put in her. Maybe Gwen might have been enough to dull the roar of loss that's ever-present in Jack's ears. She'd lost them all, too, and now Jack as well. They could've found comfort in each other, if he'd stayed, huge belly and all. They could've—

Jack shakes his head hard at the thought. No. Comfort isn't something he could offer anyone, no matter how much he wishes he could, and the solace he could have found in Gwen wouldn't have been worth the cost to her. Let her have her bumbling, kind husband and their achingly human baby. Let her find her comfort in normalcy, in the kind of home Jack has never been able to offer anyone. Maybe she can find a way to do what Jack can't do, and forget.

Jack keeps his promise, despite himself, and he doesn't forget. He dreams about Ianto's smell, in the rare moments he lets his mind lull itself to stillness. Light starch and the faint singe of a hot iron. Coffee, expertly brewed. Crisp aftershave with notes of apple and juniper over sweet skin. Spearmint toothpaste, buttery pastry most breakfasts, faint scent of ink on fingertips. Warm bite of pheromones that Ianto had no idea Jack could always smell on him, that only years of world-weariness and experience prevented him from keeping his face pressed into Ianto's neck, just to keep breathing it in.

Another leap. _Let me forget_ , Jack begs, flinging himself into the bright abyss of time. _Please, let me forget._

Another galaxy. Another hundred years. Another bar in orbit around some distant world. Jack still misses Ianto.

***

When Gwen's baby comes, they name him Dafydd, after nobody in particular. Too many friends and family lost to pick but one to honor. Dafydd's birth is surprisingly easy, only a few short hours of light contractions before making his way into this bleak world. At just under nine pounds, Dafydd is a plump baby, juicy and red-faced, with one dark lock of hair growing from the middle of his head, and he takes to the breast like he's been starved, fattening up by another few ounces before he and Gwen are released from hospital. She'd thought about having him at home, in the security and safety of her own flat, but a little voice inside whispered treacherously that a baby born at home mayn't be registered as quickly. Such a baby could disappear, as if he were never there at all. Best to have as many witnesses as possible to his presence. _He is here,_ Gwen thinks. _We are here. You cannot erase us._

Gwen clutches wee Dafydd to her breast so tightly that he squawks a protest. She shushes him by humming a song her mother once sang to her, and pretends to forget the round-ups, the screaming children deemed not contributive enough. Is that her boy, her hungry, darling boy? Are she and Rhys enough to prove his value to the empire, or are they the opposite, the kind of parents whose choices would condemn him to the list of the undesirable ten percent? In another ten years, or twenty, or fifty, will another reckoning come to divide the right subjects of Great Britain from the bad?

Gwen cries while she feeds Dafydd. Rhys tries to understand, bless him, but in the end, all he can do is promise Gwen his love and protection. She pretends it means so much more than she knows it does. If they come for her, for Dafydd, nothing will stop or dissuade them. She tries so hard to make her peace with it, but she remembers Ianto's face, waxen and still. Even Jack couldn't save him, nor even his own grandson, and Jack is gone, lost to her as surely as Ianto or her father, as Owen or Toshiko. Suzie. A dozen, a hundred other Torchwood before her.

Rhys and Dafydd are all she has left, where once the circle of her love spread so wide and encompassed so many. Dafydd cries, and Gwen shushes him gently. _Oh, wee one. Oh, my love! This world is dark and cruel and empty and bleak, yet I have surrendered you unto it._

***

Ianto slowly sips the juice they've allowed him, oxygen mask traded for a nasal cannula that leaves his mouth free for the vulgar exercise of drinking. Apple juice tastes sweet and heady as wine. The Torchwood 4 woman, with her spectacles and blood-red lips, holds the glass herself, letting Ianto drink through a bendy straw until his thirst and desperate quest for calories are sated. Fully alive and awake, Ianto sees now that her hair is actually white, rather than fair, and pulled back in a severe bun. Jack would’ve appreciated her suit.

"It's organic," says the Torchwood 4 woman, setting the empty glass on a table beside Ianto's bed that he hadn't even noticed before this moment. 

"Thanks," Ianto rasps. Even with the reconstruction of his vocal cords, lungs, and other organs complete, he sounds like a lifelong heavy smoker. Still, if that is the price for his life, the cost is absurdly low. 

"You're most welcome," the Torchwood woman tells him. 

“Name?” Ianto inclines his head towards the Torchwood woman.

“Apologies, Mr. Jones. My name is Marguerite Deleveaux. I’m the director of Torchwood Four.”

"And Jack?" Ianto asks, feeling no less pathetic or desperate this time than he has the last dozen times he’s asked.

"Still off the grid, I'm afraid," Marguerite says. She removes the spectacles from her face, polishing them with a soft cloth retrieved from her pocket.

"Tell him," Ianto pleads. "Must."

"And so we shall, provided we can locate him. Your boyfriend is quite the transitory point in time and space," Marguerite muses. 

"Jack," Ianto repeats, more firmly. 

"We're trying, Mr. Jones, but we can't force the man to answer his mobile, no matter how hard we try."

Ianto nods his understanding and concession. Jack is a hard man to find, but he'll come. Surely, for Ianto, Jack will come.


End file.
